There are many approaches to “virtual commerce”, which attempts to connect virtual worlds with the real world and use virtual worlds as an additional contact channel for real-world marketing purposes. For example, marketing in the form of virtual products based on real-world products and advertisements for the real-world products themselves have been commonly deployed to avatars in virtual world environments such as Second Life. Further, some companies have even provided technical support or additional information about their real life services or products within the virtual environment in an attempt to increase exposure to these services or products to the users behind the virtual world avatars.
Many of the existing approaches taken by companies have focused on doing business or advertising in a virtual world to make real world money. However, these techniques often fail to make a connection to establish substantive business in real life, as they fail to connect the real-world user of the virtual avatar with the activities of the virtual avatar participating in the virtual world. Therefore, current systems have been unable to perform effective real-world marketing campaigns on persons who participate in virtual worlds. There is a need in the art to utilize techniques which make customer relationship management on the real world persons behind avatars cheaper and more effective.